Public memory is short. The media too has this curious habit of remembering only what it chooses to. Nothing proves this better than the way we have reacted to the cases against Sanjay Dutt and Salman Khan, Bollywood's bad boys.

How did they acquire this imagery, the imagery that has won them so many hearts and, at the same time, got them into so much trouble? They were the first of the brash, rude, tough talking, adrenaline driven brats. They flaunted their machismo, their motorbikes and their muscles in an industry that had, for decades, celebrated the gentle hero who loved deeply and cried copiously.

Amitabh Bachchan broke that tedium with the Angry Young Man who redefined the role of the hero and made him the centre of a moral universe, ready to take up cudgels against every iniquity, even if it meant breaking the law. He was the first vigilante. From the vigilante to the bad boy was but a short step.

Dutt filled that space by his choice of roles. Khan filled it with his off-screen antics. Both played bad boy with such perfection and flair that soon everyone forgot they were playing roles and began judging them as citizens. The same happened to Bachchan during his brief flirtation with politics.

Controversies chased him non-stop till he finally chucked it all and went back to movies, to show people that the actor and the politician were separate entities.

Kaun Banega Crorepati finally killed his acting career and made him TV's biggest superstar, a gentle, polite and engaging middle-aged host who offered middle-class Indians their first opportunity to appear on entertainment TV. Bachchan buried the Angry Young Man because he knew the imagery was getting dangerously close to being identified with his real persona.

Dutt and Khan grew up admiring Bachchan. So they stepped into their bad boy roles almost effortlessly. They were so convincing that it became their instant route to notoriety, a short cut to fame. People soon forgot Khan's lover boy image and Dutt's sad, droopy eyes in Saajan. They became memorable for their sharp, edgy roles mocking authority.

Some of their performances were brilliant, like Dutt in Vaastav or Kaante. Khan got into public spats with the women in his life, walked the razor's edge with his cheeky, OTT machismo. Neither realised their life and roles were merging perilously.

That's how they became soft targets. People have long forgotten that Dutt's problems began when his father was targeted by political rivals in the Congress. They picked on Dutt juniour to destroy him. Sunil Dutt's politics was based on a simple, naive perception of nationalism.

So his rivals branded his son as a terrorist and arrested him under TADA, as part of the tragic Mumbai bomb blasts narrative. Even today, almost every news report, in print or television, mentions Dutt in the context of the bomb blasts case even though the Courts have cleared him of all charges of terrorism. He has been punished only for possessing an illegal weapon and, worse, for stupidly trying to destroy evidence of it.

But reality and imagination have got mixed up here. His friendship with disreputable underworld characters has not helped. We forget that the underworld's role in terrorism was only discovered after the Mumbai bomb blasts.Â

Khan's problems are similar. Killing black bucks is a terrible crime, true. But hundreds have done it before Khan and continue to do it every day, even inside protected game sanctuaries, often in connivance with wildlife wardens. But Khan being 'Salman Khan', the case instantly acquired a much larger spin. And he became the face of the trial. His actor colleagues who were there with him quietly dispersed, leaving him to hold the can. He did.

His other case, when reportedly, in a alcohol haze, he ran over five people sleeping on the street at night, killing one of them, which would have, under normal circumstances, been tried for death by negligence is now likely to be tried for culpable homicide not amounting to murder, a far more serious charge which could land him a sentence double of what Dutt has got.

In both cases, it's not just the crimes we are punishing but the bad boys themselves. Their reputations have done them in. Both being actors got so carried away by the roles they were playing that they simply forgot when to stop. They are paying for that. And since bad boys don't cry, they have to smile and bear it.